"71"
I tore open the envelope addressed to me from my ex wife and pulled
a note from it, it read; “Tracy, when you went to war in South West Asia you
sent this and asked me to keep it safe until you get back, I kept it safe on my
key chain for the last twenty six years, I thought you might want it back.” In
the envelope there was a small, round, brass tag with the number “71” stamped
on it. It was the tag from my gas mask.
In 1991 I sat huddled in a corner of a dilapidated underground
parking garage in the dark, I was dressed in my chemical gear and mask, I hated
breathing through it, I hated being in it, I hated the sweat that poured down
my back as we waited for the all clear sign. We didn’t know that most of the Scud
missiles that Saddam had sent to us were empty of or had very little chemicals in
them, but we knew he had used chemicals in the past so we weren’t taking any
chances. And the missiles were large enough to cause a lot of damage on their
own. As I sat there having just gotten in country, peering out through the sand
covered lenses of my mask, I thought about faith and I thought about my
girlfriend.
Old dust and sand hovered in the air thickly, my lungs struggled to
fill and I sat, waiting, tapping the small, round brass tag on the case on my
hip for my gas mask, as if to signal to myself that I was still in control.
This would be a regular occurrence while we remained in the staging area near
Khobar Village, it happened while we were sleeping, and while we stood in line
for breakfast. This was in 1991, long
before there was a permanent U.S. base of any kind in Saudi
Arabia, no Burger King, no imbedded media and no cellphones, hell they hadn’t
even been invented yet. But there was the good ‘ol U.S. mail, we would send out
letters to home, but getting mail from home was a disaster, I got letters that
had been sent to me in the first few days of my tour from my family as I was
leaving the country nine months later.
That night, as I lay staring out at the sky over the desert, I thought
about times I sat on the front steps of my girlfriend’s parents house, in the
cool Minnesota nights, the smell of fresh cut grass, staring up at the stars
and holding hands and the smell of her hair as she lay her head on my shoulder.
That was the safest I’d ever felt, back then I always felt safe in her arms, in
the stare from her cool blue eyes. But things change, I changed. And when I
returned home part of me didn’t, it remained there, buried in the hot, flea
ridden, oil saturated, blood stained sand. Any innocence that survived my
childhood was laid to rest there and despite that I wasn’t about to let go of
the only thing I knew to be safe in my world.
It would be a quarter of a century later, almost twenty five years of
struggling to make things work, to build a family and trying to be a husband
and father my wife and children might be proud of. How many times I’d wished I
was back in that filthy desert, not because I liked it, not because I felt safe
there, not because I didn’t want to be with my kids or my wife but because I
understood it there, I knew how to operate there, there was a sense of control
amongst utter chaos that gets burned to a part of a soldier somewhere deep
inside him. It’s sort of like sitting on the bottom of a swimming pool, looking
up at the surface of the water knowing that you can only hold your breath for
so long, that if you opened your mouth you might drown, that maybe when the
hurt and the burning in your lungs grows too intense you might be too far from
the surface to survive, but it’s that burning in your lungs, that sharp pain in
the back of your head as the oxygen de-pleats that you senselessly crave, it’s
like a long lost brother, a part of you that makes some sort of wickedly perverted
sense. So you close your eyes and feel it, absorb it, caress it.
